What were the best movies of 2017 doing on TV?

Calum Marsh: They aspired toward, and succeed in, very different things. But what is, I think, significant is where these masterpieces materialized

Let me tell you about a pair of images that left an indelible impression on me this year.

Both show haunted people through the windshield of a moving car. Both are stark and simple: seat-belts fastened, characters in silent repose. In the first, a man drives a woman along a quiet highway in the black of the night; in the second, a young man cruises through a small town in the afternoon with a man more than twice his age. Both are striking in their ambivalence and eerie calm. Both seem somehow… off.

Remarkably, both are more vivid, provocative and dense with meaning than anything seen in cinemas this year – and more remarkably still, both are to be found in the ghetto of cable television.

The first of these images is from the beguiling final chapter of Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, and it bristles with the nightmare force you’d expect of a vision conceived by David Lynch. The man is Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), on an ill-fated mission to whisk the seemingly amnesiatic Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) back to the bosom of her family home. For what feels like an eternity, toward the end of the 18th hour of this sprawling mystery, Dale and Laura simply drive, languishing in vehicular limbo without exchanging a word. This ending defied every convention, frustrated every expectation. One plain shot of the two of them in the car: it’s the cold proof that clinches The Return as art of the highest order.

The second image described above derives from a rather less reputable source: “Finding Frances,” the feature-length finale of the fourth season of Comedy Central’s meta-comic reality TV program Nathan for You. It’s difficult to even contextualize. Nathan for You, ordinarily,is a high-concept parody of business-improvement shows like Bar Rescue, in which director-star Nathan Fielder – who “graduated from business school with really good grades,” as he boasts dryly in the opening credits – proposes to save imperilled entrepreneurs, restaurant owners, taxi drivers and anybody else at risk of financial ruin with wilfully outrageous ideas. The concept is illustrated well by what remains Fielder’s best-known stunt: in 2014, he advised an ailing coffee shop to steal the clout of a more popular chain under the aegis of “parody law.” The result was Dumb Starbucks.

Nathan For You.Comedy Central

Now, over the course of its four uproariously funny seasons, Nathan for You explored the very furthest reaches of the American consumer psyche, mapping out the strange terrain of commercial industry with intelligence and wit. But “Finding Frances” was different. Part investigative journalism, part road movie, part video essay on the nature of performance, and somehow less insufferable than that characterization makes it sound, the 99-minute special concerns Fielder’s laborious endeavour to reunite a septuagenarian Bill Gates impersonator (Bill Heath, memorably introduced in the show’s second season) with the woman he insists he should have married 50 years ago. It’s a televised quest with real-life consequences, and what transpires proves both provocative and absurd.

“Finding Frances” is a feat unprecedented on TV and there are, I suspect, dissertations waiting to be written on its ethical and aesthetic implications. It has serious things to articulate about love and memory and time. It happens into revelations of wildly intense emotion. It analyzes Fielder’s own onscreen persona – and questions, even doubts, the show’s rectitude – with depth and gravity comparable to, say, Abbas Kiarostami, whose line-blurring docufictions feel like a distinctive influence. The episode ends on a note of such startling ambiguity that debate continues about the degree to which it was real or staged. Not that it matters, honestly. Even if it’s fake, “Finding Frances” is true.

What Mark Frost and David Lynch have accomplished with Twin Peaks: The Return – resuscitating a series that’s been off the air for a quarter-century, greatly expanding the outer limits of the material, realizing some of the most disturbing and astonishing visions ever committed to the screen, and defining all over again what is possible for the medium, among many, many other things – is no small matter. (Time will bear out the magnitude of the achievement: we’ll be talking about The Return in 25 years, and indeed another 25 after that.) Nor should too much be made of a comparison between Twin Peaks and Nathan for You. They aspired toward, and succeed in, very different things. But what is, I think, significant is where these masterpieces materialized.

It would be idle to argue too long about what constitutes a film and what constitutes television, and whether Twin Peaks and “Finding Frances” count as either, neither or both. It seems self-evident to me that the images described above are cinematic expressions – fundamentally and conclusively.

If there is a discussion to be had it ought to be about means and limitations: what about television made something like The Return possible, now, in 2017? What sort of creative latitude is Comedy Central extending to a genius like Nathan Fielder that he wouldn’t be afforded by a studio or producer of films? What we’re witnessing here, perhaps, is the beginning of a sea change: it’s not the style or content of the cinema that’s changing, but how and when the vanguard of cinema may be seen.